Articles Tagged Strategy

The biggest problem with the reputation industry, however, is its central conceit: that the way to deal with potential threats to your reputation is to work harder at managing your reputation. The opposite is more likely: the best strategy may be to think less about managing your reputation and concentrate more on producing the best […]

I was sitting by my favourite ocean (there is only one) the other day (I was on a break, remember) and I noticed some ominous-looking dark clouds over the ocean. I asked a passing waiter whether he thought it might rain. He looked at the sky, and said with gratifying certainty: “No chance. Those clouds […]

1. The Victims (“Can you believe what they want us to do now? And of course we have no time to do it. I don’t get paid enough for this. The boss is clueless.” 2. The Non-Believers (“Why should we work so hard on this? Even if we come up with a good idea, the […]

“Our strategy requires time to play out. It is a strategy designed to build sustainable long-term value for our constituents, beginning with serving our customers best. The performance metrics that matter to us are not the typical Wall Street trailing financial output indicators. Instead, they are the metrics that reflect industry thought leadership, high customer […]

If you attend a corporate retreat in Kenya, you just know what you’re going to do during the outdoor dinner, don’t you? After sufficient alcohol has been imbibed and inhibitions have been sufficiently loosened, you will undoubtedly do a “Mugiithi” dance. This is where you form a human train with the leader at the front, […]

“One of the odd questions I keep being asked about the iPad is “Where do you plug in USB stuff?” It’s a sister phrase to the weird criticism oft thrust at Apple’s device, “Ah, it’s too limiting for me: I can’t plug in USB sticks.” This is weird because other makers, notably Apple’s biggest competitor, […]

“A tumultuous 12 months that saw revolutions in the Middle East, a worsening debt crisis in Europe and a tsunami in Japan has set the tone for corporate activity in 2012. Caution, flexibility, nimbleness and deep knowledge of host countries are more important than ever, executives and their advisers said at the World Economic Forum’s […]

“Japan’s Panasonic Corp forecast a record annual net loss of $10.2 billion on Friday, joining beleaguered rivals Sony and Sharp in a sea of red ink as they struggle to fix their broken TV businesses and overcome criticism that they have lost their way. Panasonic said it was headed for a loss of 780 billion […]

A few weeks ago I predicted that 2012 would be the year of the “Twitter Big Stick” in Kenya: a time when both politicians and large organizations feel the force of feedback from social media. I pointed out that the reason for this is that the little people – customers, users, voters – now have […]

“Managers often mistakenly assume that a high-growth industry will be an attractive one. Wrong. Growth is no guarantee that the industry will be profitable. For example, growth might put suppliers in the driver’s seat, driving up the industry’s costs and limiting profitability. Or, combined with low entry barriers, growth might attract new rivals, thereby increasing […]

“In the mid-1990s I paid several visits to Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, and the cultural mindset was – with hindsight – on full display. Various executives told me how wonderful silver halide was. Professional photographers could not do without it, nor could Hollywood. Digital was for amateurs. And even they would always want […]

“Steve Jobs is above all an Apple customer. He and Steve Wozniak built devices that both of them wanted to use themselves. Wozniak brought exceptional engineering chops. Even more important, Jobs (who can’t program) brought the perspective of a passionate and non-technical customer into the design, the look and feel, and the excitement of Apple […]

“We’re always searching for that secret formula, that magic pixie dust to sprinkle over our products, services, books, causes, brands, blogs to bring them to life and make them Super Successful. Most marketing-related buzzwords gain traction by promising pixie dust results if applied to whatever it is we make, do, sell. “Add more Social!”. “Just […]

“When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago. …  There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you […]

“Things move quickly in technology, which is why technology companies are fascinating to strategists the way fruit flies are for biologists — you can see an entire life cycle in a very short span of time.” RITA McGRATH, blogs.hbr.org (5 June 2011) Columbia professor Rita McGrath points out that technology companies are these days proving […]

“If Tom Watson Sr. were to visit IBM today, he would hardly recognize what we make or the services we provide—analytics, clouds, the Jeopardy!-winning computer named in his honor, solutions for a smarter planet. But he would very much recognize why IBM is pioneering these spaces—to make the world work better through information and the […]

“Bottom of the pyramid” is all the rage these days. To make money in emerging economies, you have to find a mass-market product, says the conventional wisdom. M-Pesa, Equity Bank, Senator beer – these are all great examples of bold innovations that captured the bottom end of the market in unprecedented ways. We take great […]

“A great brand deserves a great logo and great graphic design and visuals. It can make the difference when the customer is choosing between two great brands. But these alone cannot make your brand great. Ultimately, brand is about caring about your business at every level and in every detail, from the big things like […]

“Even after a month of demonstrations in Tunisia had brought about the downfall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, on January 14th, some White House officials, along with American and Israeli intelligence experts, put the likelihood of a copycat revolution in Egypt at no more than twenty per cent. The hundred and twenty-five million […]

“The results of pursuing “more of the same” have proved to be disastrous. A comprehensive study of 20,000 US firms by Deloitte’s Center for the Edge (The Shift Index) shows: – The rate of return on assets is only 25% of what it was in 1965. – The life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune […]

A REFUSAL TO BELIEVE BAD NEWS. Firms in denial about difficulties tend to fail. SWITCHING AUDITORS. An abrupt change of auditors for no apparent reason should set off alarm bells – often this means the incumbents would not sign off dubious accounting policies. BAD NUMBERS ALWAYS TAKE LONGER Whether it is monthly management accounts or […]

“ALL ABSTRACT STRATEGY DISCUSSIONS ARE USELESS Strategy is worth thinking about if it causes you to make difficult or non-intuitive decisions. And so you have to test your commitment. “Are you saying that we have to cancel this product line?” is the sort of reaction your strategy statements ought to generate. If you can’t put […]

“Steve Jobs is famous for having said, “I want to make a ding in the universe.” Walt Disney, for having said of Disneyland, “I just want it to look like nothing else in the world.” Springsteen said, “More than anything else — more than fame or wealth or even happiness — I just wanted to […]

A few weeks ago India’s foreign minister, S.M. Krishna, stood before the United Nations and read a speech. Nothing peculiar in that – the UN, after all, excels in listening to speeches. But there was a problem: it was the wrong speech. What Mr. Krishna read out was actually the speech of the Portuguese foreign […]

“The single most common competitive mistake investors, CEOs, and entrepreneurs alike make is this: striving to do slightly better what their fiercest rival already does incredibly well. The result is usually a muddled, incoherent mess of a strategy — one that fuels not disruptive, explosive differences between a firm and its rivals, but their very […]

“What’s the best way to make the competition irrelevant? It’s a question that has obsessed generation after generation of strategists, pundits, and gurus. Is it new business models, new market space, harder hardball, or better knowledge? The answer is: none of the above. It’s Brian Fitzpatrick’s concise summary of Google’s great insight: “Disrupt yourself before […]

Last week I suggested that most of you may not be reading your newspaper in its current form for too much longer – simply because technology and social change has whacked the underlying business model. Who else is affected? Pretty much everyone. Consider one of the most wonderful products ever invented by humankind: the book. […]

Consider this product. The life of the product begins when mammoth trees are grown on a huge scale, then pulled down and turned into pulp with massive machinery. The pulp is taken to giant mills and turned into huge rolls of paper. Those rolls are trucked and shipped around the world. The rolls are then […]